At once her noiseless gown and her noble still figure are beside him.
“You must not get excited!” she says, laying a capable cool hand on his gaunt shoulder; and at once he lies back, with a sudden sense of intense well-being.
“I felt that you must all hate me,” he says in almost a whisper; and she answers slow and stilly—
“I do not think we do.”
At that he lies content a while, drinking her in with the privileged directness of the sick. What hair! What a beautiful, generous, rather large mouth! What a divine sorrowful pity! What would have become of him, if the likely, the almost certain, had happened, and she had hated him?
And Lavinia! He is the first to meet her eyes of the costly wreckage with which the South African storm has strewn the shores of the motherland; he is the comrade for whose life dear brave Bill thought it a small thing to lay down his own; and as she knows that the deed which has stretched him in suffering and weakness before her was as madly gallant as the one by whose means he lived to do it, is it any wonder that she stands in a tranced silence, drinking him in, as he is drinking her?
“I felt it very strongly when his father came to see me,” says Binning, presently, still scarcely above his breath, and harking back to the fears he had expressed of being abhorred by his dead friend’s family.
“It did him good to talk to you!” After a second or two, “He did not grudge Bill—we none of us did; and it is the very death that Bill himself would have chosen.”
“Yes; I know it is.”
There is, or she thinks it, a kind of envy in the acquiescent voice.